Industrialisation, food self-sufficiency our main focus –Charles Udoh, Akwa Ibom Commissioner

Akwa Ibom State, no doubt, is breaking a lot of frontiers in attracting foreign direct investment second only to Lagos. The atmosphere is friendly and conducive. That is why it has attracted over 17 topnotch private foreign investments in less than four years. The state Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Charles Udoh, spoke to Chooks Oko in Uyo.

Hon. Commissioner, how would you assess the past four years of the Governor Emmanuel Udom administration, the Dakkada years, as you call it?

Yes, the first half of the Dakkada years. In 2015 when the current administration took over the mantle of leadership, the cardinal objective was to redefine the economic compass of Akwa Ibom State. For a greater part of the existence of the state, we have had an economy that is driven by the public sector. And we all know that in the developed economies, the economies are primarily driven by the private sector. Economic forces are allowed to take its prime place. And so, the cardinal objective of this government was to refocus the state from being that state that was dependent on the civil service, or the public sector to a state that was investment driven. And to achieve that, we outlined a five-point agenda that set out to achieve job creation, wealth creation, poverty alleviation, infrastructure consolidation and expansion, political and economic inclusion. To drive that five-point agenda, we had three primary anchors. One was anchored on industrialisation, one on tourism and another on agriculture. Fast forward four years down the line, we can proudly look back and thump our chest and say that we have done exceedingly well. Even if we want to go by mere statistics, from the National Bureau of Statistics, that say we are the highest destination for foreign direct investment in Nigeria only behind the commercial capital of the country. That speaks volume about the integrity, transparency and accountability of governance in the state today. You also realise that potentially, beyond the shores of Nigeria, the Nigerian brand would sometimes be a hard sell to investors. But for us to have gone beyond our shores to attract not one, not two, but 16 investor-driven industries, in just four years speaks volumes of the credibility of the government of the day, led by Udom Emmanuel. Today as we speak, Akwa Ibom State proudly sits as the home of Jubilee Syringes. These are the largest syringes manufacturers in the whole of Africa.

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Today, we have sitting in Akwa Ibom, the metering solution factory, producers of most of the prepaid meters we use in the South-south zone of the country today. Add that to the list of other industries like rice, garri processing to fertilizer and the most recent one, number 17, which is the flour mill. It’s been a harvest of industries. It’s been a harvest of successful canvassing, success marketing in the international marketplace to bring to our shores these entities. With these entities came enormous job creation opportunities; from direct employment to indirect employment and that has impact on the community.

Today, the youths of Akwa Ibom State have options. They no longer look forward only to be civil servants, or one white collar office job. They also now look forward to a job in other spheres of industrial endeavour. So, if you ask us, we believe we have done exceedingly well. In terms of infrastructure, if you look at these industries, the key question people would want to ask, okay, these industries, what is the government stake in them? From China to Singapore to Malaysia, the industrial endeavours there are not run by government or funded from government coffers.

And if you come back to Nigeria, experience shows that industries and entities of that nature that were funded and run, as an extension of one government parastatal or another have over the years died. In Akwa Ibom State, you have the Newsprint Manufacturing Company that died; we have the Aluminum Company that died. Look at a state in the South-south that used to be prominent about hospitality, they had a chain of hotels, now all those hotels are all gone today. So, leveraging and learning from those experiences, we said to ourselves, look we want to benchmark international best practices. To bring international standards to bear on all the ideas we had. You can also understand why we looked at tourism. In the map of Nigeria, Akwa Ibom State is located on the far flung South South part of Nigeria, which means that it is not a thoroughfare. For any visitor to come to Akwa Ibom State, there must be a compelling factor; there must be something that pulls that person to this vicinity. So what did we need to do? We needed to create that opportunity, that pull to bring people to want to deliberately come here. To experience our hospitality, experience our good nature, experience our food and delicacies. In the last four years, we have been able to do that successfully across board.

In 2015, from when we came on board, a cup of garri was N200. But today, with N200, you buy between twelve and fifteen cups of garri depending on the part of the state. That’s not by accident. That was purely because government is using an organised method of rural agriculture.

Beyond the Ministry of Agriculture and food sufficiency we had in 2015, there is also a technical committee on Agriculture and Food Sufficiency, headed by a Professor of Agriculture to drive and promote agricultural endeavours in the state.

As we speak, every member of Akwa Ibom State Executive Council is a farmer, one sort or the other. Every key appointee of the government has one farm or the other. Now that goes to show that we have moved from the era when we were a consumption based society to a production based society. As a young man, I can’t remember my parents sending us to go and buy mango and guava. I can’t remember my parents sending us to go and buy pear when these are in season. Today, almost everybody has to buy those things. But we are saying gradually to our people, chop down that ixora, chop down that queen of the night, chop down that hibiscus flower, chop down that rose flower. Yes, they add beauty to your environment, but they are not putting food on your table. Let’s get back to the days of having waterleaf in our gardens. Let’s get back to the days of having tomatoes in our garden, having peppers in our garden. My grandmother never use to buy afang because we had an afang farm behind our house, we never knew the price of afang. So, when we get back to that naturally, economic laws of demand and supply will come to bear. Have we gotten there? We emphatically believe we have gotten there. Even if for nothing else, from the score card we have reeled out at the end of our first tenure. And then too, the unanimous and emphatic manner which Akwa Ibom people turned out to cast their votes, defend their votes, and make sure their votes counted to return the government of the day.

 

How has your government looked at these industries and planned to ensure that in the future, they don’t go the way of government industries before them?

Fantastic! That’s one of the things I said earlier. That we benchmark international best standards, we benchmark international practices by allowing economic forces to take its natural course, by allowing investors to come in and set up their facility and let them set up their businesses and run them as proper businesses. What have we done? What we’ve done is simple: To create enabling environment. One, provide land, secondly, because this government is noted for integrity, don’t forget that this is the only time in Nigeria that a governor, who is on the opposition side to the government at the centre has been invited to Aso Rock and awarded an integrity and national service award. Now, it is unprecedented, this government, leveraging on all that has convinced investors that we are serious. Beyond that also, you realise that the calibre of leadership is about the style of leadership. Today, we have a governor who is a thoroughbred professional, from his background, who is not the regular run-off-the-mill politician, and leveraging that background, he has brought it to bear. He was the Chief Financial Officer in a highbrow bank, and an executive director in a high brow bank. And so, naturally, from that position, he has a lot of experience, he has a wealth of associates; he has a long list of business partners and associates. He has built integrity over the years. And so, these people have been able to trust him. So naturally, in the words of the governor, money is a coward. Money will not go to where it does not feel safe. And so, because investors feel safe when they come here in terms of leadership and what the government is doing today, and then the environment, providing security, providing infrastructure and providing land, we have been able to attract them. And now to your question, how do we sustain these? And that is the challenge and that is why we have a completion agenda to say look, in the next four years, we should ensure that all the major projects we started are completed. And, of course, it becomes now a succession planning issue; to have the right calibre of persons in place. When you look at what we call the completion agenda, one of the key things we are talking about is human capacity development. Another key thing we are also talking about is security. Another key thing we are talking about is small and medium scale enterprises and entrepreneurs. And so we have already factored in the fact that look there will be need for continuity in terms of quality of personnel. Not continuity in terms of planting somebody there for selfish purposes but putting the right peg in the right hole. And that is why today, we are talking about human capacity development. And that is why come August 31 this year, we will be having a leadership training programme for all heads of MDAs across the state and that’s just a starting point. And this is also one government that ensures that the Executive Council periodically holds strategic sessions that sometimes spill into two to three days, all locked in a room, all we are doing is redefining, fine tuning the economic agenda for the state. Yes, there would be that challenge but again, reality is that because you’ve seen that we have laid the foundation, you have seen what we’ve done and then we allow these things to run as independent entities. You see the flour mills today that we are going to commission very soon is owned by about the largest flour millers in Europe. They could have taken their business elsewhere. They could have set up the flour mill somewhere else, but they left Europe, flew over the Mediterranean Sea, flew over the Sahara desert by-passed Abuja and Lagos, and came to Akwa Ibom State because they trust and believe in the quality of leadership.

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That’s interesting. Now, the former governor, Godswill Akpabio, has been sworn in as a minister. What is the implication of this to the state?

It’s a distraction. For us, the next four years is about governance. That’s the distraction. For us, we are looking at what benefits Akwa Ibom people. How do we actualise our eight-point agenda? How do we carry out our completion agenda for Akwa Ibom people? Elections have come and gone; it has been won and lost. And also, this government is not bent on digging up dirt of the past. This government is not bent on mudslinging. This government is only looking at Project Akwa Ibom. How can we actualise our dream for Akwa Ibom people? Come September 5 and 6, we are going to have the first Akwa Ibom educational summit. In 2015 when we came on board, we inherited over 2000 schools. An average of two to six classroom blocks in a dilapidated state. Economic realities meant that we couldn’t fix all of them in four years. It was bad. Even in the oil boom era, you know when we multiply the numbers, you can’t fix that. And so, what did we decide to do? We realised that look, education is the bedrock of any economy. What did we do? Resources were lean, an economic reality. So we decided that look, at any given time, there are hundred construction sites, schools construction sites where one school block or another were being renovated or constructed in this state. Fast forward fours down the line. Today we can sit and say we have almost 900 classroom blocks either renovated or reconstructed. That is not enough. If you go back to the numbers I talked about, two thousand plus the average, multiply it by the average classroom block, that is not enough. And so, we also realised that because we are also having free and compulsory basic education, there is also added pressure on the school infrastructure and even school curriculum and even the personnel. Children from neighbouring states are migrating to Akwa Ibom.

So the number of pupils in schools and students has skyrocketed. That put additional pressures on the infrastructure, the chairs, the desks and all that. Now, no government can fix all that numbers in four years. So what did we decide to do? We decided that look, as part of our efforts to create jobs and alleviate poverty, we set a target that if you go to any local government, as we speak, at any given time, every month, school desks are delivered to school classrooms in schools across the state. They are not enough. But of course, the reality why they can’t be enough is that we are using locals. If you go to any locality to fabricate school blocks, we use carpenters from there, because we are creating jobs, we are putting food on their table. We are not going to import them. If we are going to build school blocks in Eka Local Government Area, we are going to use people, masons, bricklayers from that area. Of course, you also understand that there is a skills gap. Because we realise that, it poses a challenge in terms of speed and turnaround time. And so to bypass that, towards the end of this government in the last tenure, we started a process of test running modular classrooms. By modular classrooms, we bring classroom blocks already pre- fabricated, create the base and install them. Now they will last longer, they will be more durable and then they are easier to fix. If you come from the airport, and look to your left, there is a primary school, you see three orange blocks. If you are going back to the airport, it’s on your left, once you leave the town. It’s a very big school. Now, those are the modular schools. If you are going now, once you pass the traffic light from the state Secretariat Annex, the primary school before the timber market, there is one that we put there. Now, the reason why we put them there is that they are pilot schemes. We want to test and ensure that they are okay, they are workable and then we can deploy them. We believe that before the end of our tenure, we will ensure that almost all the major schools in the state have good standard and decent classrooms.

And come September this year, we are going to commence a process of shutting down illegal schools because we are thinking that the quality of education cannot be compromised. And so, as we are preparing all these future for our people, we also must have to prepare them for the future. So come that 5th and 6th September, we are going to have the first Akwa Ibom educational summit where we shall sit down on a round table and look at ourselves eyeball to eyeball and say look what are the problems? What are the challenges, the school teachers? Today, the shocking reality is that the teachers in public schools earn far more than teachers in private schools. Teachers in private school, some of them don’t get their pay for two three months. But teachers in public schools get their pay on or before the last working day of every month. So, where is the disconnect? And so, to bridge that gap, we are bringing everybody to a roundtable so we can tell the teachers that look, you also have a responsibility. It is not to say, oh! you and I have the resources to send our children to private school, what happens to the guy in the street who can’t afford to? So, why can’t we fix our schools? That is why we are going to look ourselves in the face, and say look, what are the issues? Teachers, you have a role to play, principals you have a role to play, educators you have a role to play. So, what is the role each of us have to play? That is what we are trying to do. It is a long journey but graciously we have come this far and the next four years look very bright. Like you talked about the former governor, we don’t want to be distracted. A lot of the things we needed to do, we had to do them because we are forward thinking. We don’t want to start digging into the mud of the past. We are saying look, the future is bright. The next four years is very bright, we want to stay consistently focused on project Akwa Ibom.